5 ms·

The PowerPC 7457 was built on a 130nm process, used in the AmigaOne XE as well as the Apple G4 machines. That's probably about as good as you will get for an co

by moftz 6y ago

The PowerPC 7457 was built on a 130nm process, used in the AmigaOne XE as well as the Apple G4 machines. That's probably about as good as you will get for an community-led chip fabrication. You could probably get it up to over 1GHz if you made a 68k at this size. A modern FPGA is probably the better way to go for this kind of thing. I doubt this free fab includes things like die testing and packaging. That's an expensive process so someone would need to front some money to actually get the testing and packaging done for enough chips to make the cost actually worth it. It would be much cheaper to design an interposer board that could plug into a motherboard to take the place of the original 68k. This would also allow you to continuously upgrade the processor without requiring a whole new fab to take place.

perl4ever 6y ago
>You could probably get it up to over 1GHz if you made a 68k at this size That would be a fun upgrade if I had an old 68k Mac in good condition. I've thought occasionally about what if Motorola had had the resources to continue developing 68k like x86.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Coldfire is what they would have, and did, make. By dropping a few problematic instructions they were able to use a more RISC-like approach and produce a nicer core. Most code just needs a recompile, or you can trap the old instructions and work around them. I have a "Firebee", an Atari ST-like machine built around a 264mhz coldfire, and it's quite nice. My understanding is that Coldfire got used in a lot of networking hardware, due in part to its network order endianness, and partially because Freescale put network hardware support into some of the cores. But there is no continuing demand for Coldfire, really, so it has stalled, NXP never continued on with it and is going the ARM route now, like everyone else.

by moftz 6y ago

perl4ever 6y ago

>You could probably get it up to over 1GHz if you made a 68k at this size That would be a fun upgrade if I had an old 68k Mac in good condition. I've thought occasionally about what if Motorola had had the resources to continue developing 68k like x86.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Coldfire is what they would have, and did, make. By dropping a few problematic instructions they were able to use a more RISC-like approach and produce a nicer core. Most code just needs a recompile, or you can trap the old instructions and work around them. I have a "Firebee", an Atari ST-like machine built around a 264mhz coldfire, and it's quite nice. My understanding is that Coldfire got used in a lot of networking hardware, due in part to its network order endianness, and partially because Freescale put network hardware support into some of the cores. But there is no continuing demand for Coldfire, really, so it has stalled, NXP never continued on with it and is going the ARM route now, like everyone else.